


Reversal of Roles

by InconvenientImmortal



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X, Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Memory Loss, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 10:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16532990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InconvenientImmortal/pseuds/InconvenientImmortal
Summary: Light.That was the first thing he woke up to. Light, noise, and pain.—An AU where Zero was found before X.





	Reversal of Roles

**Author's Note:**

> I intended to write a cute ZeroX fanfic for a friend's birthday, but severe burnout crushed my best efforts to finish it in time. Instead, I've decided to resurrect this multichapter fic for her in the meantime, even though I swore I'd never post it. Happy Birthday bud! :'D

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In which something is found that should have remained buried._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The structure for this first chapter will be a little weird, so please bear with me while Zero tries to make sense of both who and where he is.

Light.

That was the first thing he woke up to. Light, noise, and pain.

He was keenly aware of pain all over his body, the readings processing slowly as he tried to remember where he was. Drawing a blank on this, he next made an effort to remember _who_ he was. Nothing came to mind. He tried to access his core memory, then his history, then his recent past, but to no avail. He was greeted only with glitchy, half-deleted lines of code that lingered like the charcoaled, unrecognizable remains of familiar belongings after a house fire. Corrupted files cluttered his processor, the blinking [ _ERROR_ ] messages more annoying than informative. He looked through other data stored, searching—

…Though for _what_ , he wasn’t quite sure.

His basic programming seemed to be untouched, and he gave the files a brief read-through, confirming several facts he already knew.

One: he was an android.

Two: judging from the label appended to the last of his system’s remaining programs, his name was Zero.

Three: he had no idea who he was, aside from the first two facts.

After processing this information for a minute, Zero felt another jolt of pain, confirming his theory that he had a physical form and wasn’t merely disembodied consciousness. He discovered his sense of touch was functional as the feeling of cold metal greeted his fingertips, and he realized he was lying on a metal table. His subsequent realization was his left leg and right arm were missing, and there were multiple injuries across the rest of his body, both internally and externally. 

Zero tried to close his eyes, but couldn’t. He tried to move the rest of his body, wanting to collect more information about his surroundings to find out where he was, but to no avail. His optical receptors and nervous system, apart from his cognitive self and left arm, were still offline due to the amount of damage to his body. His self-repair nanites had kicked in, but whatever damage he’d incurred was so severe, they were having a hard time deciding where to start.

Zero wasn’t sure how long he lay there before the sound of a door opening broke the silence, and he finally heard someone speak.

“—difficult to analyze its systems since most of them were blown up,” a woman's voice said critically. “Was it necessary to use deadly force? We could get more from our tests if we had a functional subject to experiment on.”

“It destroyed half our reserve tanks and sent almost the entirety of squadron B to medical bay,” a gruff-sounding man said in reply. The voices got closer, and the next sentence sounded like it was coming from right behind Zero. “As much as the army would love to learn what this… _thing_ is and who it belongs to, the most important action at the time was stopping it from causing any more harm. I’m sure you can understand our priorities, Dr. Ciel.”

The woman huffed, but relented. “Were you able to recover any of the missing parts? Dr. Cain and I would like to at least have the entire specimen in one place to study. We might even learn a thing or two about how it works by studying how the rest of its parts fit together.”

The man let out a sigh, then said, “Seems counterproductive to try and repair the damn thing when we spent so long trying to blow it up.”

“Believe me general, if we're able to learn anything from this robot, it will be well worth it.”

 

* * *

 

The second time Zero came-to, the pain in his body was less severe.

His missing limbs had been reattached at least, though haphazardly. His nanites immediately went to work again, trying to repair the connective circuitry whoever had tried to put him back together hadn't been able to fix.

Again, Zero tried to move, and succeeded in making the fingers on his left hand twitch. It wasn't much, but it seemed like his damaged nervous system was starting to make a comeback. He tried closing his eyes, and managed to blink slowly, allowing his optics to finally re-adjust to the blinding lights overhead. A steel grey ceiling rose above him, wires and tubes extending down from it, connecting to his arms and chest. He couldn't turn his head, but he was able to slowly move his eyes side to side and look around. Pliers, wire-cutters, and a soldering iron sat on the table next to him, along with a variety of other tools, as though they were operation equipment (upon reflection, Zero realized that’s _exactly_ what they were). He looked to his other side, and through a large glass window, he saw people in white lab coats sitting in front of computers.

Zero closed his eyes, trying to process what he saw. It looked like he was in some sort of laboratory, but he was still drawing a blank as to why that was. He didn’t think the humans here created him. Had he been found somewhere? It certainly sounded like that, based on the conversation he’d overheard shortly after waking up. It also sounded like he’d caused a lot of destruction before being destroyed himself, and now he was being put back together just for the sake of being studied. Likely, he was to be taken back apart after they were done with him.

Zero slowly clenched his hand. _No_. He didn't want that; he didn’t want to be some experiment. He needed to escape, but to do that, he first needed time to recover.

 

* * *

 

Over whatever period of time that passed since he’d first woken up, Zero gathered that two people were in charge of studying him; a man and a woman named Dr. Cain and Dr. Ciel. They checked in on him often, running tests or taking notes as they studied his design and inner-circuitry. Zero was careful to put himself in hibernation-mode when they ran these tests, not wanting to risk alerting them to his conscious-state. He recorded their conversations so he could review them later in solitude, ensuring he wouldn’t miss any helpful information that might fill in the gaps of his memory.

“What an incredible specimen—we should transport him back to the university, we'd be able to gather so much more information there!” The man, Dr. Cain, though slightly wheezy and elderly, seemed to be the younger of Zero’s two guardians. He was much more enthusiastic and talkative than the woman, who spoke more to herself than anymore else.

“I’ll convince the general to approve our transfer. There’s only so much we can do here.” She re-adjusted some of the wiring in Zero’s chest, then leaned back with a satisfied hum. “Hopefully he won’t demand we dismantle it before the move; Lord knows it was a pain to put it back together.”

“Ah, but I know you love a good challenge,” said Dr. Cain warmly.

“It’s less fun putting together a ten-thousand piece puzzle when you’ve already done it once before. Pass me those pliers, will you?”

 

* * *

 

It was almost a week before Zero felt like his systems were nearly fully-functional, but even with that small reassurance, he had no knowledge of where he was beyond the fact he was in a small room in a larger lab. For all he knew, he could get up, try to run, and end up at a dead-end. He needed a better opportunity.

Zero was reviewing his recordings again, trying to see if there was some small bit of helpful information he may have overlooked when he was startled by the sound of the door bursting open. The man and woman approaching his table, talking animatedly.

“—remarkable really, it’s as though this robot has some sort of automatic method of self-repair!” Dr. Cain said almost breathlessly. “I'm telling you Dr. Ciel, if we could even replicate that one feature—!”

Dr. Ciel spoke seriously, “What concerns me is that its self-repair systems are _still_ online. The general said they killed it, and I confirmed that it wasn't functional after running my initial tests. This self-repair feature wasn’t active then, so why now?”

“If it were any other researcher, I would say there’s always a chance of human error, but I know you better than that, old friend. Still, this is a unique creature we’re dealing with; it’s entirely possible that certain programs are only activated under specific conditions.”

“While that may be the case, the fact of the matter is it’s active _now_. We don’t know to what extent this self-repair can operate.” There was a grim silence for a moment. “…I hate to admit it, but the more we work on this specimen, the more I feel like maybe the general was right and we should've left it be.”

“Do you think we should talk to him about it?” Dr. Cain said in a dispirited tone.

Dr. Ciel paused for a beat, then sighed. “Let's not get too hasty. It took a lot of bargaining to get the general to agree to let us to study this thing, much less sign the paperwork to transport it to the university tomorrow. I misspoke—I don't think we’re in danger of it popping back up at any given moment. While it _is_ strange that its repair system is still active even after its primary CPU—so to speak—has been destroyed, given our tests and the fact the army dropped half a dozen explosives on it and who knows how much gunfire, I highly doubt its CPU is still functional. I do think it's curious that its auto-repair is still working though. Perhaps it's a last-resort program that's only activated when all other systems are offline? If that's the case, they were activated a little too late.”

Dr. Cain chuckled. “Perhaps the person who made it isn't quite as competent as we thought.”

“Still, the fact remains that its first instinct was to attack. If we can discover whether that's the result of a glitch or part of its base-programming, we could better understand what this robot was built for.”

“Hopefully we'll get more answers when we take it back to the university.”

Dr. Cain and Ciel talked a few minutes longer, but Zero had stopped listening. He was out of time—if he wanted to get out of here in one piece, he’d have to do it soon. They were going to transport him tomorrow, and Zero had no way of knowing what they were going to do to him once they got there. His one advantage was that from the sound of things, they weren’t going to bother taking him apart for the transfer. His best option would be to make his escape some time during the trip. It was risky, but Zero reasoned it would be easier to escape from the transport vehicles into the open rather than try and find his way out of whatever labyrinth he was currently in. For now, all he could do was wait for the dawn.

 

* * *

 

The morning came; calm, and with far less tension than the preface to an attempted breakout warranted.

The vehicle Zero was placed in was heavily armored, based on the sound and weight of the truck as it pulled up. His eyes had been closed after the general (Dr. Cain and Ciel’s boss, it seemed) commented it was, “Creepy to have him stare like that”. Zero didn’t risk opening them when there were so many scientists and soldiers milling about, so the only information he gathered was from sound and touch. Zero was placed in a sealed containment chamber with a rounded glass cover about an inch thick. This wouldn’t prove to be an obstacle to him; Zero was certain he could break through it, and the metal frame of the truck he was in. What mattered now was the timing.

Minutes ticked by as the trucks fell in line, the ground under them shifting from smooth to gravely to bumpy as the transport left the even pavement of whatever their starting point was. Zero tensed, readying himself. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Thirty. How far enough away did he have to be? Was he still too close that if he ran, the humans could call for backup and recapture him easily? How close was this ‘university’ the doctors mentioned? Had he waited too long and missed his chance to escape?

Yet, even as these thoughts churned in the back of his mind, Zero opened his eyes. The error-messages glitching his system had finally settled into background-noise, his nanites having completed enough repairs to increase his overall functional capacity to 70% of its normal caliber…not that he necessarily had a frame of reference for what 100% capacity meant for him. But this would be enough. It was enough.

Even without his memories, of one thing Zero was certain: he was built to fight. Battle protocols and combat systems roared online, aching to be used and set free like a starved caged beast. He pressed a white-gloved hand to the glass of his containment chamber, a spider web of cracks spreading from the firm pressure of his fingertips against it. They could not keep him here. Fighting tactics formed in his mind in quick succession, ideas for how best to decommission their transportation and incapacitate their fighting units. He would show them how foolish it was to try and use him like they had.

And if the humans wanted to stop him, even after all that?

 _Well_.

Metal shifted as his arm rearranged itself from the elbow down, a buster-gun forming and glowing with charging energy.

_Let them try._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: this is not MM0's Ciel. She had several ancestors who were accomplished scientists; this is one of them. I subscribe to the **[theory](http://wintesm.tumblr.com/post/164217576593/in-this-day-and-age-youre-not-allowed-to-be-a)** wintesm came up with that 'Ciel' is a last name, so I ran with it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> As I said in the beginning, I've been suffering from severe burnout for *checks calendar* almost half a year now, so I can't make any promises about updates, but I'll continue doing my best as always. I hope you all do the same.


End file.
